| From the time that “eclectic” returned to the critical vocabulary of art history and aesthetics in the eighteenth century, it has provoked anxious debate. “Eclectic” and “eclecticism” were, in nineteenth century Britain and France, concepts that provoked anxiety about the possibility for progress in the arts, the consequences of historical belatedness, and the use of historical styles in the absence of an appropriately modern style. In that time and place, the connotations of eclectic were largely negative: to be eclectic was to be mediocre, undiscriminating, middle-class, confused, decadent, liberal, mixed, and unoriginal. Works of genius were not eclectic. The art of the nineteenth century, if eclectic, would not adequately represent the age to itself or to future generations. Having no claim therefore to be the first eclectic period in history, the period from roughly 1760 to 1890—from Winckelmann to Pater—must then be distinguished in other ways. Responses to this dilemma of style by artists and critics such as Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Sainte-Beuve, Stendhal, Hippolyte Taine, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, T. B. Macaulay, Thomas Love Peacock, Honoré de Balzac, John Ruskin, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater will provoke a new understanding of nineteenth-century aesthetics in general. In a dissertation both comparative and interdisciplinary, I argue for the value of “eclecticism” as a critical and aesthetic category alongside the more familiar “romanticism,” “realism,” “aestheticism,” “'modernism,” and “decadence.” I establish the value of this term through a genealogy of its operations, both in England and on the Continent, within painting, architecture, and literature. This genealogy distinguishes between a bourgeois eclecticism propelled by capitalist economics, and one characterized by its “high” aestheticist opposition to that “low” form. In both its high and low forms, eclecticism looks backward to ancient philosophical tradition and forward to postmodern stylistic anarchy. |
